What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and
voted up or down.

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted
to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning,
there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

The other 2 commands that are listed will also kill the egrep process and any libexec processes because the .exe isn't escaped so it is really using . meaning anything containing exe. The command i posted escapes the (dot) in .exe and then filters the actual egrep process so that it doesn't get killed before the other processes being killed. Also added the -9 switch for kill to send sigterm to the processes, in case people are wondering why processes aren't getting killed after running just kill . This should work better for people :)

If you know that you want only the first match from a 'find' command, this will terminate the find as soon as a match is found.

Recent versions of GNU find have the -quit parameter, which does the same thing as this, so this is only useful if you are stuck with an older version of find. or need to write a backward portable script.

I can't take credit for this - I saw it on a chat room where I work and thought it was useful, so am sharing it here both for others, and in case I want to remember it in the future.

and they all fail in a .bashrc I've tried escaping the quotes and can't find a way to make the single quotes ' that awk wants work. Maybe I'm just stubborn but I don't want to put in a little #!/bin/bash file just so I can kill a firefox process all in one stroke. This script works (it kills the process before it errors out)... it's just ugly and there may be a pretty way to do this.

I use this command, within a cron job, to kill XMMS after a certain amount of time. This command returns the PID used by XMMS, and gets passed to the kill command. Another alternative would be ps aux | grep xmms | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs kill

Kills all process that belongs to the user that runs it - excluding bash, sshd (so putty/ssh session will be spared). The bit that says grep -vE "..." can be extended to include ps line patterns that you want to spare.

If no process can be found on the hitlist, it will print # NOTHING TO KILL. Otherwise, it will print # KILL EM ALL, with the cull list.